


Christmas and the Day After

by allfireburns



Series: Things Left Behind on Purpose [4]
Category: Torchwood
Genre: Angst, Christmas, Gen, Historical, POV Third Person, Pre-Canon, War, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-16
Updated: 2009-11-16
Packaged: 2017-10-03 01:55:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allfireburns/pseuds/allfireburns
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack is at the Christmas Truce, and sometimes the weight of tradition is a bit too much.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Christmas and the Day After

**December 25, 1914**  
Christmas Day in Belgium was cold, to absolutely no one's surprise, but Jack was sweating nevertheless when he dropped back into his trench. He felt overheated and freezing at the same time, and couldn't stop grinning even so.

"What was the score?" asked one of the kids in the trench, iglancing up from the letter he was writing as Jack rifled through the pockets of the coat he'd left here earlier, searching for something.

"Four to nothing." Jack paused, and then looked up, adding just in case it was unclear, "They won."

"You let the Germans _win_?"

Jack laughed and spread his hands. "I said I could play football, not that I was good at it. What do you want from me?" He located a small flask of whiskey, tossed it in the air, and caught it smoothly. "I'm going back up for a while longer."

The kid looked over at him again - Jack never could stop thinking of them as kids, any of them. "What for?"

"It's Christmas," Jack said, flashing him a grin. "Traditionally there's an exchange of gifts." Less traditionally across enemy lines, standing in the middle of No Man's Land, but that was a tradition Jack was all too happy to flaunt.

Private Raske was one of the soldiers who'd come out to No Man's Land for a game of football earlier. Jack met him out on the trampled mud, gave him the whiskey, and wished him a merry Christmas. Raske gave him a bar of chocolate in return - small gifts, but between enemies, such things weren't quite so small after all. Raske's English wasn't good, but Jack remembered enough German for them to get by.

"My wife," Raske said, handing over a battered picture. "And our daughter, Adele."

"She's beautiful." Jack studied the picture, wondered how long ago it was taken, how much the baby in it had grown and when she'd last seen her father. "Both of them."

"Do you have anyone at home?"

_Does Torchwood count?_ Jack thought wryly, but didn't say it. "Not really. I try not to leave people behind." _Which is easier if there aren't people to leave behind at all._ He handed the picture back.

"What are you fighting for, then? Glory? Queen and country?"

"Pretty personal questions for a first date, Private Raske," Jack answered with a laugh, feeling vaguely uneasy at the question. "I'm..."

He cast about for an answer. Because this was the way history was meant to go. Because he had to be somewhere, doing something, and it might as well be here. Because of a girl named Rose Tyler, who wouldn't be born for seventy years. Because he might find him here, where history was happening.

He settled finally on, "Tomorrow, I guess."

"That's not much."

**December 26, 1914**  
Jack ran into Raske the next day. He could have shot him, but he knew what his wife looked like, and the name of his daughter, and they'd exchanged gifts just the day before.

He barely felt the bullet, one shot to the head, down in a heartbeat, and he woke up in the cold and the mud with a gasp and a headache, wishing vaguely it were possible to just lie down and die again. There seemed, to Jack, little point in breaking tradition on one day if everything snapped right back to the way it had always been on the next.


End file.
